Ted Serios

LIFE magazine presented a lengthy article about Serios in 1959, its writer having met Serios four years earlier in Chicago; several of the Polaroid images were shown: "Ted's big test with us came when we arranged for him to perform for a research group associated with one of the most highly respected photographic institutions in the country. Ted was ecstatic. 'This is it, Paul,' he said on the plane coming east. 'I'll show 'em. After these cats look me over, people will have to believe.' On the ride back to Chicago, however, he wept. He had not been able to even fog the film." In an article in the October 1967 issue of the magazine Popular Photography, Charlie Reynolds and David Eisendrath, both amateur magicians and professional photographers, claimed to have exposed Serios as a fraud after spending a weekend with him and Eisenbud. Reynolds and Eisendrath said they spotted Serios slipping something into the tube that Serios claimed he needed to help him concentrate. They surmised this was a picture of something that the camera would take an image of, but which Serios would claim came from his mind rather than his hand. Robert Todd Carroll later wrote "after the exposure he remained virtually unheard from for the past 30 years." In 1968, W. A. H. Rushton, a professor of physiology and president of the Society for Psychical Research, rejected any paranormal interpretation of the photographs. He suggested that it was light that formed the photographs from a luminous picture placed in front of the camera lens hidden in the 'gizmo'. Rushton successfully replicated the Serios phenomenon by holding a little reflecting prism that contained a microfilm picture against the camera lens. James Randi, stage magician and noted scientific skeptic, took an interest in investigating Serios. Randi claimed Serios used "a simple handheld optical device" to perform his photographic trickery. Randi wrote he replicated the trick of Serios on a live television show in New York and Eisenbud was "flabbergasted". According to Terence Hines: Serios would use what he called a "gizmo," a tube of paper placed against the camera lens. He said this helped him to focus his mental energy and direct it toward the film. He also used something he didn't tell anyone about—a tiny tube about one inch long and one-half inch in diameter. This tube had a tiny magnifying lens at one end. In the other end one could insert a piece cut from a standard 35mm slide. Lined up properly, this device projected the image on the cut piece of transparency onto the film of the Polaroid camera. The device was small enough to be concealed in the palm of the hand, so it could be used even when the larger paper "gizmo" wasn't around to conceal it. In an article in New Scientist titled "The Chance of a Lifetime" (24 March 2007), an interview appears with the noted mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis. During the interview Diaconis mentioned that Martin Gardner had paid him to watch Ted Serios perform, during which Diaconis claimed that he caught Serios sneaking a small marble with a photograph on it into the little tube attached to the front of the camera he used. "It was," Diaconis said, "a trick." Gardner wrote that "the parapsychologists who once took Ted Serios and others like him seriously would have been spared their embarrassments had they known anything about magic."